Twitter has launched a new version of its website. It's a complete overhaul which brings in much more relevant content as it relates to a given tweet via a second panel on the right hand side off the stream. It's all about engagement Twitter Founder Evan Williams told attendees of the press conference which was held this afternoon at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters.

Here's an introduction video that was shown during the press release. And here's an image on Flickr on which Jeremiah Owyang has noted (mouse over the image) some of the features and functionality of the new layout. The new version will roll out in batches over the next few days and weeks.

Fan Appz has announced it has integrated its platform with Facebook Places. Facebook Places, if you recall, is the Foursquare-like service that allows people to check in to places making it possible for their friends to see where they are. Fan Appz's Offers for Facebook Places makes it possible for business to create offers such as discounts, rewards and incentives based on a customer's location-based activities.

For example, a local restaurant can use Fan Appz to offer a free menu item to those customers who check-in at their establishment, say, four times during the course of a month. Fan Appz will automatically verify that the customer has met this criteria and unlock the offer for the client to print out or display during their next visit.

Foursquare is already doing the same thing but Fan Appz brings the check offer to Facebook Places. For the time being, the jury is still out on whether or not Places will, ahem, displace Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based services. But it can't be a bad thing for marketers to have this sort of offering within Places. After all, Facebook has 500 million users compared to Foursquare's three million.

Today, Facebook introduced new metrics to measure the effectiveness of the "social context" portion of the ads on people's pages. Social context is the sentence in the ad that shows people which of their friends have liked or engaged with the Facebook Page, event or application.

Nielsen shows people are 68% more likely to remember the ad and twice as likely to remember what the ad said when they see a friend has interacted with the ad on Facebook.

Facebook advertisers can find the new social metrics on the Reports Tab in the Facebook Ads Manager. Marketers will be able to see the number of clicks, click through rate and percentage of impressions from ads with social context.

Social Rewards, a new service for brands that want to add a social media element to their loyalty programs launched today during Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco. The company, which aims to blend together loyalty marketing and affiliate marketing with social media will allow brands to reward people for spreading brand messages across the social media universe.

Sanyo, The Venetian and The Palazzo are the first brands to launch with Social Rewards.

IZEA has launched WeReward, a Foursquare-like check in application that awards redeemable points for completing tasks and checking in. It's like Foursquare but instead of a game, it's a revenue source. And that's a good thing. Because after a while collecting badges becomes tiresome. On the other hand, collecting money never does.

The social graph. Data portability. Privacy. Data control. Peerset CTO and Co-founder Amit Kanigsberg has a few things to share on these topics in this second post in a series on the use of personal data.

Pursuing Transparency is no Private Matter

What does transparency mean to you? In the online advertising industry it conjures one of two things: 1) For the advertiser, full insight into the ad serving stack (from agency to publisher) or 2) For the consumer, full insight into the targeting data ad networks and data providers collect (e.g., Google, Bluekai).

If your first thought was #1, you are forgiven. It is after all natural to follow the money. And there is plenty of it being strewn across that field. But I'll argue that you should be thinking about the consumer a bit more, the sleeping giant as it were. And if you jumped straight to #2, then I'd bet you felt that current efforts and lackluster hype around transparency seems a bit, well, lacking, slight, effervescent, wispy, ethereal - more translucent really.

The social graph. Data portability. Privacy. Data control. Peerset CTO and Co-founder Amit Kanigsberg has a few things to share on these topics in this second post in a series on the use of personal data.

Fish Anyone?

All of this hype surrounding online privacy is a red herring, especially as it regards Facebook. We learned this week that privacy is not the central concern for Facebook users. The "Quit Facebook Day" protest groups have barely gained membership. Quitfacebookday.com only managed to attract 35,000 members for their mass exodus yesterday. Next to Facebook's close to half a billion users, this just doesn't seem very significant (a good article considering this perspective).

- Need to find the best ferry to the Cape and Islands? Yea. There's an app for that.

- The Art Directors Club will host the ADC Young Guns 5+5 Thursday June 10 at the ADC Gallery. Five winners from ADC Young Guns 7 pick five creatives they admire, all 10 present their work Pecha Kucha-style: 20 slides + 20 seconds each = 400 seconds to tell their story.

- This billboard stinks. The billboard uses an attached fan to disperse charcoal and pepper fragrance from scented oil.

A New York Times story screams, "An Ad Engine to Put 'Mad Men' Out of business. it's a story about PlaceLocal, a program that creates an ad simply from a person entering the name and address. Then PlaceLocal spreads its tentacles and gathers images, video, hours of operation, phone number, blog commentary on the business and other information. Once that information is gathered, an ad magically appears, Yes, it's true. And it's impressive. But it's not going to put Mad Men out of business.

This sort of service is perfect for the local baker or car dealer or restaurant or any other small business that can't afford to pay for an agency or even a freelancer. Of course, it won't be long before agencies use this service for their pown clients, pass the work of as their own and then charge 20 times the actual cost.

Hmm. This really isn't a bad thing. Small business can make decent ads on their own. And lazy agencies can use it to up their revenue. What's not to love?